Masterplanning the Adaptive City

TV
I think one of the features of European modernism that all architects and
urbanists had to deal with in the last century was the persistence of the
historical legacy of the city upon which they superposed their modern world.
Recapitulating Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, the city is a field for negotiating
its history and modernization. Asian urbanization has confidence to build and
finalize the city in one go, which seems not only shortsighted, but incredibly
wasteful. The history of Hong Kong as a model should raise alarm for what
China should not do: build the city once, tear it down; do it again, tear it
down; keep tearing it down until it seems right and mature. All cities grow
and change and eventually go through a feverish state of redefinition, and
then they settle to be mature cities. 
BS
Don’t you find that interesting how cities can be built, torn down, and rebuilt?
TV
I think it’s more interesting that cities are built in ways to enable urban
culture to mature and endure. 
BS
Well, that’s good European sentiment. I think that you need to defend your
belief against a billion people today who think otherwise.
TV
Here are some paradoxes. Between flexibility and inflexibility of a design; 
the wish for permanent, long-lasting, and enduring architecture versus the
adaptability of the city and its ability to change; fitness for purpose versus
indeterminacy. On the one hand the city should be long-lasting, which albeit
is a European bias. On the other hand, the city needs to have the capacity to
be able to absorb all kinds of dynamics and change. 
BS
It’s a very clear point of view, but I think you have to then defend the
argument that that form of change and transformation cannot be
accommodated in any other ways. The Asian solution seems not to adapt the
city but simply build a new, different city, which is a countermodel to the
argument you are making, that cities themselves don’t need to adapt. You
and I would expect that cities inherently have that structural and cultural
capacity to do that. Clearly the Asian experience is suggesting a
countermodel, which is that the city is actually the latest extension of a
functionalist form of adaptation which modernist architecture was willing to
live with at the scale of building, but not at the scale of a precinct or city.
When you think of the ways in which buildings themselves outlive their
purposes, in say Cedric Price’s argument, you just tear the building down and
refigure it. Cedric’s other extreme, which is to say when I need a university I’ll
adapt a disused postindustrial landscape, as Potteries Thinkbelt, and turn
that into a university. The Asian phenomenon demonstrates how that
argument can be scaled up so that it happens at the scale of the city and that
seems to be the thing you are resisting in your argument. You’re saying that
there can actually be a considerably malleable urban settlement strategy or
pattern that can carry on in time. Asia seems to be saying the opposite, and
they just keep building new cities.
TV
Also demonstrated over the last twenty years is how such bad architecture
has been built as a result of ongoing rapid urbanization, leaving little choice
but to tear it down and rebuild it again, but better. So I agree with Cedric
Price’s second category of adaptive reuse. Reprogramming is a model 
which is still materially, economically, and environmentally more sustainable
than a tabula rasa model, which is what is happening all over Asia. It is
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BRETT STEELE WITH TOM VEREBES

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increasingly a bankrupt ideology on economic, social, environmental
grounds to build only for the short term. 
Let’s discuss the extent to which computation isn’t just a tool for spatial
heterogeneity or geometric complexity, but to build in capabilities to manage
and interact in real time with change in cities.
BS
As a kind of design operation?
TV
Yes, but also as a management tool, as an interface, or a way of interacting
with the ongoing changes which differs from the overspecificity and
determination of the masterplan to be describing a fixed, teleological
endpoint. 
BS
Although you could say that’s a quality that is increasingly hard to find.
Perhaps the functionality that a plan played in the past is now being
performed in other ways through real-time sensing, or more malleable
planning regulations or something that allows for change of some other
form. It’s almost the loss of teleology today that I guess I’m wondering about.
The one thing that the discipline had was the ability to project a future, which
our generation seems to have surrendered that will. It’s another century
now—we are not going to do the big plan, rather, we are going to expect 
that the future is unknowable, unpredictable and we are going to set up
infrastructure for many different scenarios to play out. On the other hand you
can say if that entirely surrendered free-market altitude to the future is really
in place, you know what’s going to happen is the most valuable people in the
world are those who claim the ability to plan the future. I’ve been thinking a
lot about this lately, not at an urban scale but at the scale of architectural
knowledge, that the idea of investing in a vision of the future has almost
universally been unloaded. No one our age has a vision of the city in twenty
years. Fifty years ago everyone was doing a city of the future. Your project is
aiming for a vision of the future too.
TV
I’m keen to confront the seeming crisis of a distinct lack of capability to
conceive, with great certainty, multiple ways in which the future can play out.
Over the last five years, we’ve discovered the world is incredibly
unpredictable. A masterplan from early 2008 would soon have become an
almost useless document as a result of the GFC [Global Financial Crisis].
Alternatively, we can develop methodologies to project the future but
knowing that the future can change and adapt. We might get it entirely
wrong, as the city is wild and not fully controllable. I am trying once again to
make claims that we can project the future but admit that it’s not a future
that we’ll be able to say that there’s an absolute end to it. How, then, can we
harness and embed complexity through computational tools and interfaces,
rather than trying to eliminate complexity?
BS
It can sound very quickly like the purpose of that project is to avoid failure. 
In fact, one of architecture’s great capacities is its consistent failure. 
Every version of the future that architects have ever drawn up has been
categorically wrong, and yet we look back on the history over centuries and it
still defines the form of knowledge we think of as architecture. Palladio’s
cities, Ledoux’s cities, Le Corbusier’s cities were never realized in their time.
In each case it was its failure that makes it still so compelling today as a form
of knowledge. What you are making an argument for is the urgency for
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